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<title>Blue-Collar Fried Potatoes by ChainSmokesPens</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28724967">Blue-Collar Fried Potatoes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChainSmokesPens/pseuds/ChainSmokesPens'>ChainSmokesPens</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Cooking, Fantasy, Flash Fic, Food, Potatoes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 11:41:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,803</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28724967</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChainSmokesPens/pseuds/ChainSmokesPens</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: [WP] You've been searching the world for the best fried potatoes of them all, your adventures have lead you to an unassuming dinner in the middle of an empty road, as you take the first bite you notice the locals looking at you</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Blue-Collar Fried Potatoes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The tavern was in the middle of nowhere, resting on the side of a dirt road in the valley, far off from the nearest down. The wood was worn and the ivy was a little out of control, but the warm lights shinning out from the inside, the smell of roasted meat, and the sound of laughter made it pretty clear that the place wasn’t abandoned.<br/>I reached for my satchel and checked my book, making sure no more pages had fallen out of the hole in the bottom. Once I confirmed it, I made my way toward the tavern.<br/>I pushed the door open and it creaked louder than I was prepared for. I was almost embarrassed when everyone turned their eyes on me, but they went back to their conversations pretty quick.<br/>I was struck in the face by a hurricane of smells. Chickens were being cooked, almost definitely in a brick oven, stuffed with what smelled like herbs, onions, and garlic. Then again, maybe that was just my eyes feeding my nose information, picking up on the union soup a man at the bar was eating, the sweet and hearty combination of the onions and beer reaching me from halfway across the tavern. I took another step in, just in time to see a woman shove the door to the kitchen open, carrying a beautifully browned pig on a tray in one arm, carrying a platter of tall steins overflowing with golden liquid in the other.<br/>My tongue drowned by how heavily I was salivating. I gulped it down and made my way further inside.<br/>Some would call the ground floor cozy. I would call it small. There were stairs leading up to a balcony where more tables were set, the make of the wood similar to that on the ground floor, but clearly around two decades newer. With a full bar, eight booths on the ground, and ten booths on the balcony, I estimated the place could fit around one hundred and twenty people. If they all sat pressed shoulder-to-shoulder.<br/>Which the customers didn’t seem to mind doing. It was an older crowd; I don’t think anyone in there was under thirty-five. The men were dressed in stained, casual clothing and the women all had well-worked hands. Everyone seemed to perform some blue-collar labor. I, being in vest and slacks, carrying my old school satchel weighed down by an oversized book, felt more than a little out of place.<br/>I moved over to the bar, sitting as far off from the other patrons as I could, circumstantially putting as far away from the only entrance-exit I’d seen since I came in. This place had to be older; the regulations in the last township wouldn’t have allowed any restaurant to operate without at least two exits. Or at least without a bar top that wasn’t stained four shades of brown from years of spilled beer.<br/>The waitress approached me from behind the bar. I felt myself melt a little, seeing her big eyes, small frame, and wide smile approaching. I was shaken out of that when she slapped the table in front of me. Her strong hand with its many faded scars contradicted her softer, more feminine features.<br/>She said, “Hello there! What can I get for you?”<br/>She was loud, probably so I could hear her over all the conversation going on. I readjusted myself and said, “Yes, I was wondering if you had potatoes?”<br/>It got distinctly quieter and I could tell, even if they didn’t turn to look at me directly, the pair of men nearest me at the bar had stopped their conversation to listen.<br/>The waitress laughed at my question like I was being absurd, and I felt like I was back at the university again. “Of course we have potatoes. I’d never work at a place that didn’t have potatoes.”<br/>“I’ve never eaten at a place that didn’t have potatoes,” one of the men nearby said, more to his friend than to either me or the waitress.<br/>“I’d never eat of a place that didn’t have them,” his friend replied, slapping his shoulder drunkenly and wheezing out a laugh.<br/>I was probably red with embarrassment. The servants at my house didn’t prepare them when I was growing up. We lived on brussels sprouts and celery.<br/>“Johann,” my dad would say, watching me disinterestedly roll the vegetables around on my plate as he ritualistically quartered his brussels sprouts individually, surgically dividing them leaf-by-leaf into a giant salad of boiled greens, “always remember that the vegetables you eat must be green. Green is the healthiest color for consumption, as science would tell you.”<br/>My sisters would parrot him, scoffing at me for not being as devoted to brussels sprouts as our doctor father. And my mother would fawn over him like he was the smartest man alive.<br/>I was pulled back to the present when a stein of beer was slammed in front of me, splintering wood from the table and striking me in the face. The waitress smiled at me.<br/>“You were gone for a minute there, buddy.”<br/>I had no idea. There were at least five sets of eyes on me now, looking over my clean clothes and satchel, looking at my thin frame and pince-nez.<br/>“That’s from me,” a mouth from beneath one of the pairs of eyes said. The man looked about fifty, but with about sixty years of muscle mass on him. “We don’t get a lot of people from the city around here.”<br/>Technically I was from a hamlet at the coast, but that wasn’t going to win me any favors with this crowd. “Well, I’m just passing through.”<br/>“Oh yeah?” The man pulled out two cigars. I raised my hands to decline. He paused, scoffed at the idea he would’ve offered me one to begin with, and put them side-by-side in his mouth. “God a light?”<br/>Smoothly, I pulled my pack of matched from my satchel, lit one, and held it to his cigars.<br/>The group was impressed and the man laughed. “Macy, get this boy his potatoes.”<br/>“You got it, chief,” the waitress said, walking to the back and shouting, “Yo, Seamus-”<br/>The “chief” called my attention back to him. “You’re a student at a university, aren’t you?”<br/>There wasn’t any point denying it. Everything about me gave me away. “Yes. Well, I was.”<br/>He pulled his cigars from his mouth. “I can tell. I’d never seen someone light a smoke for someone else so fast. You must be a grade-A ass kisser, aren’t you, boy?” He gulped on his beer while his friends chuckled behind him.<br/>“Well, it’s because of all the,” I paused, struggling against years of sanitized language to get out, “ass kissing that I had to leave.”<br/>“Had to leave?” he asked, popping his cigars back in his mouth.<br/>“That I left,” I corrected myself. “The ass kissing is why I left.”<br/>“I see.” He reached in my satchel, catching me wholly off guard and pulled my book out, slamming it on the table and getting beer on the cover.<br/>“Careful!” I said, throwing my thin arms over it.<br/>“What is this? There’s not a title or anything.”<br/>“It’s my cook book.” The book was bound in red leather, an image of a black pot on the cover. The leather was peeling in many places, though. And the vibrant luster of the red was faded, compared to when I’d first gotten it.<br/>The book was also empty when I’d first gotten it, two thousand blank pages that needed to be filled by recipes I wanted to record. The entries were initially neat and orderly, a detailed image of the dish in question drawn carefully in the top corner of each new recipe.<br/>But, as the pages went on, my actually notetaking habits, the notetaking habits that were frowned upon by my teachers, peers, and family, showed themselves. Neat descriptions gave way to scratched out sentences with addenda written vertically up the side. Drawn food were seen less frequently, as I was more concerned with eating a hot meal than capturing its appearance. Some pages had been torn from other books and stuck within the pages of certain recipes, notes of modifications to make later. Some had little sheets pasted carelessly over the middle.<br/>The patrons were impressed as we flipped through the pages, me explaining what they were seeing. I knew they lived inland, but I was shocked that none of them had ever seen a crab before. Many of them didn’t even know that there were more than three types of fish. They weren’t interested in the wines I’d tasted, but I was surprised to learn that many of them had had mead before. I struggled to explain the differences of flavors between bison meat and bull meat. I also struggled to explain the differences between oysters, mussels, and clams.<br/>We laughed as I told them about my disastrous experiences with bear meat. I got pats of sympathy when I told them about the time when I got my wild mushrooms mixed up and spent three days being sick from both ends. I even pulled up my shirt to show them the stab would I got when I went fishing for swordfish.<br/>Then a plate clattered in front of me. And my nostrils flared, picking up the smell before I even turned to the plate.<br/>These weren’t the potatoes that I’d been expecting. At the university banquets they were cloud-like, topped with things like peas or chopped pork. These, were another thing entirely.<br/>It was two potatoes that had been cut lengthwise into slices three-quarters of an inch thick. Their traditional white interior was not a shimmering golden color, dripping with some sort of fat and covered if heart chunks of salt. Macy placed a small bowl right next to it. I recognized it immediately as cheese. Cheese that’d been melted down to a bubbly, white paste, mixed with the red specs I recognized as cayenne.<br/>I didn’t take the time to say my prayers. I paid no mind to how hot the potato was when I scooped it into my fingers. I jabbed it into the cheese as fast as I could and brought the searing mixture to my mouth, heedless of the new cheese stain on my book.<br/>The pain was searing, but I muscled through as best I could, burning the interior of my mouth on the salty-savory flavors within it. My stein was pushed closer to me and I snatched it up by both hands, latching my lips to the side. A few hearty gulps later and I brought it back down, sighing out in pleasure.<br/>Everyone leaned in closer.<br/>I said, “Amazing,” and they burst out into cheers.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So...I want to make it clear that fantasy is my brand. And I wanted to put fantastical elements in this story. But it seems that they just didn't fit naturally into it. In my mind it's still a fantasy though, even if the fantastical stuff doesn't pop up.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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